“Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.”

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it’s any different.

Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn’t bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

nothing is so sad as the injustices of old age.

There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course – the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled

The sun burnt on, drugging everything with warmth.

I’ve never been drawn to the feminist movement. I was brought up to believe that men had little to do with the home or children – except to bring in the money.

When passion is mutual, there is always the danger of the fire burning to ashes.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Moonlight lined the windowsills like a fall of snow.

Americans like to believe we can overcome all obstacles and always triumph in the end, but that’s not real life and a steady diet of stories like that will give you a pretty unhealthy view of reality.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

This is a wonderful book, unique and engaging. Diaconis and Graham manage to convey the awe and marvels of mathematics, and of magic tricks, especially those that depend fundamentally on mathematical ideas.

In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view.

From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.

The weird thing is that I hate to fly, and the quote that I give people is that every time I get off a plane, I view it as a failed suicide attempt.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.